Shadi Habib Allah, still from S/N: 8F1GNA0021, 2012

Frozen Lakes
Artists Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Fl.
New York, NY
Opening: Saturday, January 19, 6-8pm

This group show, curated by Artists Space’s director and curator, Stefan Kalmár, and its curator, Richard Birkett, takes as its jumping-off point the Pictures show that Douglas Crimp organized at Artists Space in 1977. Crimp introduced the work of a generation of artists, and their use of “quotation”, “excerptation”, “framing”, and “staging”, that has since become synonymous with the postmodern relationship to pictures.

Frozen Lakes examines the prominence that these artistic strategies have for a generation of artists born after Pictures. It equally attests to the changing nature of critical inquiry within today’s economy of image production, and the shifting relationship between information and meaning.

The temporalities that Crimp identified in Pictures – “the staged tableau”, “the freeze frame”, “the historical fragment”, and “the fascinated, yet perplexed gaze” – sought to highlight the picture as a “signifying structure of its own accord”, usurping the reality that it claims to interpret. The contemporary experience of images is saturated with a heightened notion of temporality: signifying structures circulating and performing through networks of value, desire and exchange. The sense that pictures occupy very distinct places in culture, and reveal a vertical “strata of representation”, has been replaced by fluid, maybe even liquid, modes of accumulation and aggregation.

From mode of production to conditions of circulation, ‘Frozen Lakes’ investigates how [young] artists are approaching images today.

Shadi Habib Allah, Ed Atkins, Banu Cennetoglu, Aaron Flint Jamison, Tobias Kaspar, Metahaven, Ken Okiishi, Charlotte Prodger, James Richards, and Slavs and Tatars.